Wednesday, August 17, 2016

King's Survey: A Story Where Nothing Happens

In
which we experience the rhythms of ordinary life in an ordinary time—the life
and time, no matter where or when it is, that most of us inhabit.

So here I am getting ready to talk with you about the coming of
the American Revolution, and I find myself looking at Ethan.

—Hey, Mr. K.

Greetings, Ethan. You’ll note that Ethan looks reasonably alert
compared to Chris—or what appears to be Chris, if that’s Chris’s mane on a desk
at this ungodly hour of 8:30 a.m. Ah, Chris, nice of you to join us. Ethan, I
see you’re wearing a vintage Rage Against the Machine t-shirt.

—It was my dad’s.

A fact which reinforces the point I was about to make. Ethan is
wearing his dad’s Rage Against the Machine t-shirt. Which is to say that we
have here a kid who’s wearing an emblem of rebellion from an earlier
generation. The fact that he’s wearing his father’s couture amounts to an act of
filial piety.

—What’s couture?

Clothing, Jonah.

—And what’s filial piety?”

Honoring your elders, Emily. Do you do that?

—Ummm … Sort of.

Sort of?

—I mean, I try.

Figures.

Hey!

Now, now, dear Em. My point is that the Founding Fathers would
be probably be scratching their heads to see Ethan wearing a Rage shirt—what
could possibly anger one about a mechanical device? —though perhaps Thomas
Jefferson would get it, given his ambivalence about role of machines in
American life and his enthusiasm for rebellion everywhere (except among his
slaves). “The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of tyrants,” he
famously said at the time of the French Revolution. So I don’t think he’d mind
some Rage. Though I suspect he’d be disappointed that Ethan couldn’t be more
original.

—Well, I have a Kendrick Lamar T-shirt too. Would that work?

I dunno. Doubtful. But that’s OK. We can’t all be as
bloodthirsty as Thomas Jefferson.

—You’re
kidding, right?

Well, no, Yin. But I am digressing. Let me get back on
track. What I want you do now is imagine yourselves, dear students, not as
happy residents of the 21stcentury
but instead as a people who were born somewhere in one of the thirteen original
British colonies in 1760. (Among other things, this birthdate will make you the
age you are now when our friend Jefferson makes his famous Declaration.)

—Just like the Magic School Bus.

Right. But while those time-travel books drop you right into the
middle of a dramatic situation just before it happens, I’m hoping to land us into
a moment in which nothing particular is happening. You might find yourself in
any number of circumstances, but I don’t think there’s any really big event
that takes place in the colonies in 1760. Technically, there’s a war on—there
have been wars between England and France going on almost continually for the
last 70 years—but the hugely important Battle of Quebec has just been fought.
Now it’s all over but the shouting; the British defeated the French in that
battle, and then went on to take Montreal in this year of your imagined birth.
Both cities, I’ll point out, are in Canada. And you’re not. So we’re going to
say this action is far away. (Pretty mucheverythingis far away at this point; roads are
poor when they exist at all. Trips you now make in hours now were measured in
weeks.) Besides, you’re a baby. Maybe you’ve got an uncle or something off
fighting. But right now you’re on the far rim of the European world, almost
surely living on a farm. That farm might be isolated, or it might be in a village.
There’s a slim chance you’re living in a city. But you are, literally and
figuratively, provincial, living on the edge of a global empire that sprawls
across North America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia.

By the time you’re born in this Year of Our Lord 1760, there
have been English settlers on the Atlantic seaboard for over 150 years, and
forced African migrants for about as long. So your family might well have been
here for many generations already. They might be more recent arrivals, too,
whether from one of those places or perhaps part of a new wave of migration
Scotland. Or from that region of Europe we know as Germany. In any event, you
get my point: what some have been calling “the New World” is kinda old already.
A civilization that rests, as all civilizations do, on the exploitation and
displacement of the weak, has been established. But it’s fragile; how fragile
depends on the precise location—North has more critical mass than South; East
is more secure than West—but the whole span of the rim is solidifying.

The rhythms of everyday life on this perimeter haven’t changed
in 1760. Indeed, in some important respects, they haven’t changed in thousands
of years. You’re up at first light; your workday ends at sunset. Depending how
rich your family is, you might have money to burn in the form of candles, but
virtually no one is reckless about that. Your home, even if you’re rich, is
likely to be quite small—tiny by 21stcentury standards. Men, women and
children will huddle together in rooms and beds, as much for warmth as for a
lack of space. Work, no matter what it is, will involve significant amounts of
drudgery. Most of it will be manual labor, and most of that will involve
farming: plowing, planting, weeding, harvesting. Milking, shepherding, shearing.
Household tasks like churning, baking, and washing. Even cushy professions like
the law will involve lots of routine tasks like copying letters contracts, and
other documents—there are no Xerox machines— though if you’re successful you’ll
have someone to do some of that stuff for you. Then, as before and later, the
key indicator of wealth is the degree to which you have someone else to do your
work, from housecleaning to executing trades.

What varies are the tiers, and kinds of tiers, between the
bottom and the top. In between the ranks of free and slaves is a stratum of
indentured servants. Essentially, their labor has been sold (maybe by their
parents; maybe to pass the cost of their travel to America) for a fixed number
of years, typically seven. Indentured servants learn a trade from a master,
after which they are free to become journeymen, and, hopefully, masters
themselves. Women perform work anddevelop skills
that ideally will allow them, after their indenture ends, to marry, start
families and become mistresses of households. Social mobility is real but
finite for white people, and a handful of black ones, though this has declined
as the line between slave and free hardened.

No matter who you are, the pace of life is slow. Travel, as I
already mentioned, is time-consuming and often unpleasant if not dangerous.
News will routinely take months to cross the ocean—and traveling on water is
generally faster than traveling on land. Routine transactions like buying and
selling will be constrained by the lack of banks, paper money and trust: most
trade will take the form of barter, and will involve people you know. Though
you’re aware of a wider world, you live in a very small one.

—Sounds boring.

Well, you don’t know any alternative, so you’re not likely to be
unhappy about it. In any case, boredom is less of a problem than fear. There’s
any number of things to be afraid of, beginning with disease. Indian raids are
always a possibility. And the weather is a source of chronic anxiety. There are
the destructive storms, of course. But as often as not it’s seemingly routine
weather patterns that pose a threat: Too much rain? Too little? Too hot? Too
cold? Your family fortunes rest on conditions for which there is nothing in the
way of reliable forecasts, and over which you have no control.

—What do people do for fun?

Well, any number of things. But the important thing to keep in
mind is that there’s not nearly as much time for fun as there is now. Which,
again, is not something you’re likely to notice. There are a few people—the
planters on the great estates—who like to think of themselves as men of
leisure. But they often have to work harder than they’re willing to admit to
maintain what they have, and their wives have often have responsibilities, too.
There are no expectations of very young children (rich or poor, slave or free),
who often mingle, but before long everyone must take theirplace,
a term that was understood literally as well as figuratively, whether that
place was in the fields or with one’s tutors.

But to answer your questions, there are any number of pastimes.
Some involve horses for those who have them. Card games. Of course, there’s
always sex. Then, as now —maybemorethen than now—it’s the default
free-time activity. And that includes people your age, though with barriers to
prevent actual intercourse. For instance, there’s the practice of bundling,
where boys and girls are allowed to sleep together if they remain wrapped in
separate blankets. Such forms of socializing follow events like barn-raisings,
where the people in a town would pitch in to help each other with big projects
they can’t manage on their own. Parties often follow, where there’s lots of
alcohol; beer and cider are staples, along with whiskey. People at this time
drink like fish—an average of over seven gallons annually for every man woman
and child, in part because alcohol, since it’s sterile, is safer than water,
where countless microbes lurk.

—But weren’t they Puritans? All uptight and stuff?

Well, Emily, someof them were Puritans. Descendants of
the Puritans, anyway. But the Puritans weren’t really prudes in that way when
it came to drinking or certain kinds of sex. That said, you had to be careful:
the expectation was that if a girl got pregnant, there were great pressures for
the boy to marry her. By 1760, this was as much for economic as moral reasons
in a given community: raising that kid isyourjob; don’t makeusbear the cost of feeding your brat. On
the other hand, if you’re a slave, your child is a slave, too. So slave owners
had a real financial incentive for people to have sex, which they encouraged.
And in some cases forced. Sex was a popular pastime, but it had its dangers
too, whether as a matter of rape or a high mortality rate for pregnant women
and newborns. The colonial woman gave birth anaverageof seven times in her life. She
typically spent most of her adulthood pregnant or nursing.

—Oh my god.

Funny you should mention him, Em. Because that’s where we’re
going tomorrow: to church.

About King's Survey

King's Survey is an imaginary high school history class taught by Abraham King, a.k.a. "Mr. K." Though the posts proceed in a loosely chronological fashion, you can drop in on the conversation any time. For more background on this series, see my other site, Conversing History. The opening chapter of "Kings Survey" is directly below.

“The Greatest Catholic Poet of Our Time . . . Is a Guy from the JerseyShore? Yup,” in The Best Catholic Writing 2007, edited by Jim Manney (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2007)

“I’s a Man Now: Gender and African-American Men,” in Divided Houses:Gender and the Civil War, edited by Nina Silber and Catherine Clinton (Oxford University Press, 1992).

THE COMPLETE MARIA CHRONICLES, 2009-2010

Most writing in the vast discourse about American education is analytic and/or prescriptive: It tells. Little of that writing is actually done by active classroom teachers. The Maria Chronicles, like the Felix Chronicles that preceded them (see directly below), takes a different approach: They show. These (very) short stories of moments in the life of the fictional Maria Bradstreet, who teaches U.S. history at Hudson High School, located somewhere in metropolitan New York, dramatize the issues, ironies, and realities of a life in schools. I hope you find them entertaining. And, just maybe, useful, whether you’re a teacher or not.–Jim Cullen